Are there any USB flash drives or SD cards which use RAID or redundant storage for additional reliability?

I'm looking to get a fault-tolerant USB flash drive, which saves data to multiple independent locations, whether using RAID or some other means to back up data. Has a product like this ever been created, or are my only options to hack something together?

(By the way: I'm aware that RAID doesn't prevent data corruption from software or the file system. I'm just looking for something that can handle one of the memory sticks going dead.)

Luke Dennis

Posted 2012-04-04T22:32:45.563

Reputation: 283

Answers

There are USB to SATA HD enclosures that support more than one drive and can do basic RAID. One example is the BYTECC BT-M252U3 which is USB3 and supports two SATA 2.5" drives (HD or SSD) with the main drawbacks being it looks to require external power and is much bigger than a USB thumb drive. Still since it uses 2.5" drives it's pretty small and if using a USB3 port and SSDs it might not need the external power adapter.

enter image description here

Brian

Posted 2012-04-04T22:32:45.563

Reputation: 8 439

Yea, the external power is kind of a killer but a pretty cool concept. – JOTN – 2012-04-04T23:36:11.530

I've never seen a raided flash drive for sale as one unit. I have seen a demo where someone built a redundant ZFS pool on flash drives. ZFS can rebuild the pool even if the device paths completely change or even if you don't have all of them. I don't know how practical it is as it was meant only to show how zfs works.

JOTN

Posted 2012-04-04T22:32:45.563

Reputation: 531

Addonics has a Dual CF - SATA HDD Adapter you could use (AD2SAHDCF - $24.95). It has a RAID 1 mode. If you wanted USB, just use any 2.5" USB-SATA enclosure.

chx

Posted 2012-04-04T22:32:45.563

Reputation: 3 069

Also, http://us.apacer.com/products/specification/SRFD%2025S there's an Apacer device which converts two CFast cards into a 2.5" SSD with RAID. I have no idea where to buy it and CFast cards are rare. DV nation sells them at the low price of 99 for 16GB, 199 for 32GB and 299 for 64GB...

chx

Posted 2012-04-04T22:32:45.563

Reputation: 3 069

Raid is a redundant array of disks. Even if you partition the drive, and store multiple copies of your data, you still only have one drive. There is no way to change this really, unless there was something like 2 (or more) USB drives connected to a hub stored in one case, and you used software RAID for that. Never heard of such a system though.

soandos

Posted 2012-04-04T22:32:45.563

Reputation: 22 744

That's what I mean: perhaps two microSDs inside a USB enclosure and mirrored with RAID-1. – Luke Dennis – 2012-04-04T23:29:45.333

Right, thats how I would do it. – soandos – 2012-04-04T23:33:56.207